This invention relates to a drawer for a medication dispensing cart; such as, the medication dispensing cart claimed in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 07/662,750 which is incorporated by reference herein. Because of their open construction and use of a guide rail system, carts like these are able to house drawers of various vertical dimensions. Such versatility is especially important in the medication dispensing industry because there are numerous medication dispensing systems on the market which necessarily require storage drawers of varying heights.
Medication dispensing carts, like those disclosed in the previous reference, are used extensively in extended care facilities (i.e., nursing homes) and in general and acute hospitals. These carts are typically pushed from one patient's room to another and contain such things as patient medication and equipment for checking a patient's vital signs. Because different institutions, and in fact different wings within the same institution, can have different patient requirements and administrative needs, there is a demand for various configurations of such dispensing carts. In response to this demand, a wide variety of such dispensing carts have been introduced into the market. Such facilities typically provide health care to a diverse patient population with a wide variety of medical needs. Such a patient population necessitates maintaining the availability of a wide spectrum of medication and equipment in order to provide for day-to-day patient requirements.
In response to this spectrum of medical needs, the industry has in the past and continues today to provide customers with the flexibility to choose, for any given cart configuration, drawers with different vertical dimensions. Thus, each dispensing cart can be tailored to each individual customer's requirements.
Until the present invention, all such drawers had permanent vertical dimensions which required each manufacturer to be able to produce a wide variety of such drawers, with the manufacturer, or distributor, necessarily having to keep an inventory of each variety (i.e., various vertical dimensions) or else risk not having a requested drawer on hand. In addition, if a customer wished to change the vertical dimension of any drawer they were using, each such drawer would have to be replaced. Because they typically do not stock such replacement drawers, customers would be forced to wait until the new drawer was shipped and received before their needs could be satisfied.